UMass Dartmouth undergraduates receive international research opportunities thanks to National Science Foundation

UMass Dartmouth Physics Professor Grant O'Rielly has been awarded $249,695 from the National Science Foundation to engage undergraduate students from UMass Dartmouth and other regional colleges in his research program at the MAX-lab research facility (www.maxlab.lu.se) in Lund, Sweden for the next three years.

UMass Dartmouth Physics Professor Grant O'Rielly has been awarded $249,695 from the National Science Foundation to engage undergraduate students from UMass Dartmouth and other regional colleges in his research program at the MAX-lab research facility (www.maxlab.lu.se) in Lund, Sweden for the next three years.

At least six students will spend 10 weeks each summer conducting research with international collaborators at MAX-lab. The experiments the students will be engaged in bombard protons and neutrons with energetic photons and use various detectors to measure the properties of the particles that emerge from these interactions. The results from these measurements will be compared with theory, and will help physicists better understand the structure of the proton and neutron.

The students will also have the opportunity to present the results of their work at national physics conferences. Previous participants in this program have gone onto graduate studies in medical physics at Duke University and nuclear physics at the University of Notre Dame. Another participant is employed as a technician in the undergraduate physics labs at MIT.

"These students will have a unique opportunity to fully engage in the act of discovery alongside outstanding scientists from around the world," Dr. O'Rielly said. "In doing so they will not only be learning and preparing themselves for future endeavors, they will be advancing international cooperation."